Kepler Planet-Hunting Visionary Retires After 53 Years at NASA

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The driving force behind NASA's prolific planet-hunting Kepler
mission is retiring, ending a 53-year career with the space
agency.

Bill Borucki came up with the idea for the
Kepler observatory in the early 1980s and continued
championing the concept through four failed proposals until the
mission was finally approved in 2000. He is stepping down from
NASA today (July 3), agency officials said.

"Bill's unique leadership, vision and research tenacity has and
will continue to inspire scientists around the world," former
astronaut John Grunsfeld, head of NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, said in a statement. "He retires on such a high note
that he leaves a legacy of inquiry that will not only be
celebrated, it will be remembered as opening a new chapter in the
history of science and the human imagination." [ Gallery:
A World of Kepler Planets ]

The Kepler spacecraft, which launched in March 2009, finds alien
planets by noting the tiny brightness dips caused when these
bodies cross their host stars' faces from the telescope's
perspective. The $600 million mission has discovered more than
half of the 1,900 or so exoplanets known to date, and it has
shown that rocky,
Earth-like planets are extraordinarily common across the
Milky Way galaxy.

This success was hard won. For years, Borucki (who was based at
NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California) and his
team fought doubters who didn't believe the team could build a
spacecraft sensitive enough to detect faraway exoplanet
"transits" while staring at thousands of stars simultaneously.

"The argument back then was, it could not be done, it wouldn't
work, and it was by the most prominent people in the science
community and the engineering community," Borucki told Space.com
last year. "But we made it work. We showed there was another way
mankind could explore the galaxy."

Proposals for the mission that would become Kepler were rejected
in 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998. The breakthrough finally came in
2000, after Borucki and his team had built a testbed facility to
prove out the instrument's sensitivity. (They had also built, a
few years ealier, a special telescope at Lick Observatory in
California to address concerns about Kepler's ability to measure
many stars at once.)

"Those were joyful days of hard-earned celebration to be sure,
but Bill wasn't one to pat himself on the back. The qualities
that kept him moving forward in the face of rejection were the
same qualities that kept him focused on the job ahead," Kepler
mission scientist Natalie Batalha, also of NASA Ames, said in
the same statement.

"To me, Bill embodied the essence of NASA — the childlike spirit
of discovery, the tireless work ethic, and the playful tinkering
and risk-taking that leads to bold innovation," she added.

During his first decade at NASA, Borucki worked on helping get
astronauts to
the moon and back. His research on the radiation levels
experienced by spacecraft returning to Earth was used in the
design of the Apollo capsules' heatshields, NASA officials said.

Borucki then spent 12 years studying Earth's atmosphere and
lightning activity on other worlds before spearheading the Kepler
project.

"My greatest honor has been the opportunity to develop and lead
the Kepler
mission. It showed the galaxy is full of Earth-size planets
orbiting in the habitable zone of other stars. New and more
powerful missions will tell us if the galaxy teems with life,"
Borucki said in the statement. "I hope that young people the
world over will take up the challenge to explore our galaxy and
will build missions to continue our search for life and to find
our place among the stars."

Though Borucki is retiring from NASA and stepping down as Kepler
principal investigator, he won't be giving up research
altogether. Next month, Borucki will start another chapter as a
volunteer "Ames Associate," in which capacity he'll continue
studying alien worlds and planet formation, NASA officials said.

The Kepler spacecraft's original planet-hunting mission lasted
until May 2013, when the second of the telescope's four
orientation-mainting reaction wheels failed, robbing Kepler of
its ultraprecise pointing ability. The observatory is now
embarked on a new
mission called K2, in which the spacecraft is searching for
planets and eyeing a variety of cosmic objects and phenomena,
including comets, asteroids and supernova explosions.